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A 27-foot fiberglass lumberjack stands on a 20-foot platform above the former site of Shofner Lumber Co., home of May Cafe, a Vietnamese restaurant, just south of Central Avenue on Louisiana Boulevard in Albuquerque. New Mexico Magazine says it began life as a giant chef.
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Lumberjack figure May Cafe sign
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Site-level location · 35.0784° N, 106.5697° W
FIELD GUIDE
The story
New Mexico Magazine calls the lumberjack above a Vietnamese restaurant Albuquerque's “oddest fellow”, and says he started life as a chef.
According to the magazine (updated in November 2025), the 27-foot-tall figure stands on a 20-foot-tall platform atop the building that has housed May Cafe, near the corner of Central Avenue, the old Route 66, and Louisiana Boulevard. The site was formerly the Shofner Lumber Co., and the magazine says the first Paul Bunyan to stand there was lost in a 1970s fire. A KRQE report in 2019 instead put the lumber yard fire in the 1980s.
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A lumberjack statue raised on a platform above a building that has housed May Cafe, a Vietnamese restaurant, near the old Route 66 on Central Avenue. Take photographs from the public sidewalk.
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Just south of Central Avenue on Louisiana Boulevard SE, Albuquerque, at the building that has housed May Cafe. The statue is raised high on the building and can be seen from the public street.
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